Attacks on the Internet infrastructure in France

On the night of July 28–29, vandalism hit the long-distance fiber optic backbone in France. Technicians are already working to repair it, but several operators were affected.

After the TGV lines, the fiber optic network? Yes. On the night of July 28–29, 2024, after the first weekend of the Olympic Games in Paris, France woke up to another act of vandalism against its infrastructure.Nicolas Guillaume, head of professional operator Netalis, claims that long-distance cables were cut overnight.

In his message, he announced that the sabotage of these cables affected several operators, including Netalis and Free. OVH also appears to have been affected. The X account of Free Pro, the professional arm of operator Free, also reported the event, advancing the sabotage hypothesis: “Since 2:15 a.m., our backbone network has experienced a significant slowdown. Connections have been disrupted, likely due to vandalism affecting our fiber optic cables,” the statement read.

Des dégradations commises dans plusieurs départements cette nuit ont affecté nos opérateurs de télécommunications.

Elles ont des conséquences, localisées, sur l’accès à la fibre, la téléphonie fixe et la téléphonie mobile.

Sous ma supervision, le centre pour les communications…

— Marina Ferrari (@Marina_Ferrari) July 29, 2024

French Minister of Digital, Marina Ferrari, took the floor at 10:28 a.m. on X to condemn the “damage” committed in several departments and assured that the “center (ed., commissioner’s office) for the defense of electronic communications” was working with operators to resolve the incident.

Some X users say the Internet network, which fortunately does not use a single cable, was disrupted, with connections cut between northern and southern France. Olivier Bonvalet, also on X, made a “traceroute” from Lyon to Roubaix and noticed that the information he was sending passed through Singapore before returning to France. As a reminder, traceroute allows you to follow the path of a packet sent from one computer to another connected to the IP network. When everything is working properly, the path is the shortest. This is clearly not the case.

The sabotage is believed to have been coordinated at multiple points, with impacts reported in Montpellier, Marseille, and on the Lyon-Paris and Paris-Strasbourg links.

According to Free, a French web provider, which is communicating transparently about the incident, six departments are affected: 11 (Aude), 34 (Hérault), 51 (Marne), 55 (Meuse), 13 (Bouches du Rhône), and 84 (Vaucluse).

So France is clearly under an attack by coordinated vandals, practically acting at a terrorist level. Fortunately, the Internet infrastructure is much more robust than the railway infrastructure, and the problems have been limited, but clearlye there is a social malaise in France that the government is ignoring, but which, sooner or later, could cause major problems.